Hacker News Reader

nfmon Poll: long-term contractors, what is your hourly rate?

Obligatory pro tip: Don't bill hourly. Bill weekly whenever possible, and anchor your consulting rate to the outcomes you can achieve in a week instead of to 60 minutes of your attention.

nfmon Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

When you say "magic", what you really mean is "abstraction", which is a more suitable and neutral word to describe the pros and cons of using a higher level language.

Not that I disagree with your premise - if you need to write highly performant code, lower level languages will pretty much always be faster. But abstraction is extremely beneficial in many other circumstances.

nfmon Ruby is too slow for programming competitions

That's a ridiculous set of alternatives.

nfmon Security incident update

"Linode Manager user passwords are not stored in our database, but their salted and cryptographically hashed representations are."

Sounds like it's not stored in plaintext.

nfmon Security incident update

"Despite the uselessness of these hashes"... Hrm.

nfmon I Tried Hacking Bitcoin and I Failed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Kaminsky

He found serious flaws in DNS and SSL. Of course one code review is not authoritative, but he is pretty credible.

nfmon How a banner ad for H&R Block appeared on Apple.com without Apple’s OK

I remember reading about someone with neighbours that were stealing their wifi. You can do much more interesting things with a proxy server than just inject ads: http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

nfmon David Heinemeier Hansson: Every Employee Should Work From Home

Linkbaity article title - not remotely a quote.

nfmon Closure

Man, startups are hard. B2C startups are really hard. Best of luck with the pivot!

nfmon Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

That is a historically naive assertion. Take a look at the list of countries in this article - most of them are still in pretty serious shit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...

It very rarely works out.

nfmon Why We Don't Use Heroku

I think the whole sysadmin/devops thing is an inescapable problem to some degree.

If it's something that nobody on your team can tackle you can easily end up with completely disparate development environments (with devs running different ruby versions, app servers, even databases!) when there's no well documented system for setting up environments.

Heroku makes it dead simple to deploy and add services, but if your team can't manage to do that for local development anyway, things can end up in a really bad state.

nfmon Ask HN: Webdevs, designers: what devtools should we (Mozilla) build in Firefox?

Firefox is my primary browser, but I use Chrome to do development, entirely because of the dev tools. I'd really like to move my development back to Firefox.

For me, I'm held back more by the UI rather than the features. I find the different, independent panels very confusing, and the popups (for eg. XHR request info) drive me nuts. I'm sure there's a strong rationale for how it is, but it doesn't quite click for me.

I've tried going back to Firebug where the UI is more my style, but for me, it's too slow (on my not new, but not old laptop). It often takes several seconds to launch the select element tool, and can lock up for a couple of seconds at a time.

The built-in tools are much faster, which is great. I'm just not accustomed to the UI, and have reservations about whether I can get into it or not.

nfmon CoffeeScript in Firefox console with DOM support

Thanks for the clarification :)

nfmon CoffeeScript in Firefox console with DOM support

Looks great, but the 2.x series seems like it requires Firefox 20. Do I need to get on the beta or is it just an addon version requirement mixup?

nfmon Ask HN: Where do you get ideas to build side-projects?

Obligatory pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html. Start here.

nfmon Ruby 2.0.0-rc2 is released

Thanks Steve :)

nfmon Ruby 2.0.0-rc2 is released

I don't know a lot about this, apart from the fact that the implementation is a bit contentious. Can you elaborate on some of the opposition to refinements?

nfmon Ruby 2.0.0-rc2 is released

Can't wait to see refinements start getting used in libraries. I guess it'll be some time until people start requiring Ruby 2.0, but there are some seriously excellent new features in the works. See https://speakerdeck.com/a_matsuda/ruby-2-dot-0-on-rails for a good overview.

nfmon Rack - Important Security Upgrade

I'm going against my better judgement in trying to critically engage you, but what's your background? Are you a security researcher? Have you audited Django? Have you read the Python source code? Why do you think a given language community is going to be more secure than another? Is security one of the tenets of Python?

nfmon Rack - Important Security Upgrade

Yeah, you can be fined, audited, have your merchant account revoked - all sorts of badness.

nfmon Where to join a startup? Analyzing 'Who is Hiring' posts on Hacker News

It does seem crazy, but anecdotally, it's pretty common.

The number of people in my CS degree that couldn't program - at all - was astounding. I did a final year subject on databases, and ended up in an end of semester group project with two students that didn't know the difference between a table, and a database.

nfmon Three charts are all I need

I really hope that the term "Infauxgraphics" gets some more traction.

nfmon Ubuntu's bug #1

It's been 9 years since the bug was reported - how much have the stats changed since then?

nfmon Building Firefox OS

What's the browser?

nfmon Know your closures: Ruby's blocks, procs, and lambdas

This post deserved so many more upvotes! Fantastic summary, and explained lots of things I didn't quite get really well. Bookmarked.

nfmon Unsafe Query Generation Risk in Ruby on Rails (CVE-2013-0155)

Are you thinking of http://www.updateditis.com/ ?

nfmon Dependency injection is not a virtue

That's not TDD. You define the expected behaviour first (which still can be wrong, now or in the future - they're based on your current assumptions/spec/other mutable thing), then ensure the code produces output that matches your expectations. Your output is now as correct as your understanding of the solution.

nfmon Cheddar is For Sale

This is something I've experienced first-hand, and an extremely valuable lesson for people thinking about starting a startup. At a low average monthly cost (say less than $30), it's really damn hard to get enough people into your funnel for a reasonable cost of acquisition. And you need to reach a LOT of people for your service to be a significant source of long term income.

If you're about to start a startup, I'd strongly encourage you to come up with some hypothetical figures for these metrics:

* Number of monthly uniques

* Percentage that will convert to trial

* Percentage that will convert to paid

* Average monthly subscription cost

* Churn rate

* Cost of acquisition

You'll be way off, but run the numbers you've made up past as many experienced founders as you can, and you might be able to come up with a model that's semi-realistic. Of course it will evolve over time as you get some real data and more experience, but the main point of the exercise is to then ask yourself questions like: "How can I get X0,000 uniques to my marketing site on a $0 marketing budget?", and "What can I change about my product/positioning/target market so I can triple my average monthly subscription cost?".

nfmon Windows 7/8, Linux, OS X Full Disk Encryption FireWire Exploit

A previous tool for the same class of exploits (Firewire DMA): http://web.archive.org/web/20100510013948/http://www.storm.n...

Were these kinds of exploits noted when writing the 1394 spec and ignored in favour of the DMA feature?

nfmon Page Weight Matters

Is there a consulting market for fixing these kinds of examples? I quite enjoy optimizing these kinds of issues, but perhaps the value is too implicit or too low for them to bother.